Wowza Community

HLS stream shows artifacts in Microsoft Edge on certain devices

When I create a livestream in Wirecast and set it to stream to my Wowza Streaming Cloud trial, the resulting HLS videostream does not play properly in Microsoft Edge on certain systems.

So far, I’ve discovered the stream works fine on computers with a dedicated graphics card, but it does not work properly on laptops or Surface devices with only an Intel HD videochip. On these systems in Edge the lower half of the screen is stretched, filled with pixel artifacts and in general does not render properly. On a still image this issue persists, on moving footage the graphical errors appear mostly after screen changes and then persist for a little while before the stream ‘recovers’ slightly, then it goes bad again a few scene changes later.

I have encountered this error on multiple devices, mostly laptops and Surface tablets, but also a pre-fab Lenovo desktop PC. The problem exists both in our fully up-to-date JWplayer as well as in the OS X / iOS test player on the Wowza website as well as in a standard HTML 5 videoplayer.

I am aware of the FAQ item about this error, which details how Microsoft Edge version 25 apparently does not have this issue. However, the Edge on one of troubled systems is fully updated at version 38.14393.0.0 (EdgeHTML 14.14393) and they still have this issue, so it’s not a simple matter of updating Edge to the latest version.

The Safari browser on Mac OS X does not have these issues, only Microsoft Edge on devices with Intel videochips seem to suffer it.

My streaming settings in Wirecast are as follows:

Video:

Codec: x264

Resolution: 1280x720

FPS: 25

Average bitrate: 2500 kbit/s

Quality : 3 (standard)

Profile: Base

Keyframe every: 50 frames

Constant bitrate and keyframe alignment are OFF, switching these on seems to have no effect.

Audio:

Channels: Stereo

Bitrate: 128 kbit/s

Sample freq: 44.100 kHz.

Also, please note that while our Wirecast Encoder is not the latest release at version 5.0.3, I have also tested this with a trial version of Wirecast 7.1 and got the same bad playback.

Anyone got any advice? I’d love to hear it! Thanks! :slight_smile:

Hello,

Thank you for the great description and information with the issue you are seeing. Can you please log a support ticket as this will require us to review your logs on your account and see if we can identify any issues? Once we review the logs for insight, we will then attempt to reproduce the issue ourselves. Depending on those results, I will setup a test on our production servers for you to point your WireCast to and provide you playback urls for testing again.

Please go to www.wowza.com/support and log a ticket and be sure to reference this forum post or simply copy/paste the post into the description of the ticket.

I look forward to assisting you with this issue.

Regards,

Mac

Anyone got any advice? I’d love to hear it! Thanks! :slight_smile:

We identified the Issue with our hls packager. If you setup a livestream please use the HLS/HDS delivery type. This will resolve your issue.

We are working on fixing this for all other stream target types.

Thanks for reporting

Philipp

We identified the Issue with our hls packager. If you setup a livestream please use the HLS/HDS delivery type. This will resolve your issue.

We are working on fixing this for all other stream target types.

Thanks for reporting

Philipp

Hi, in which version it this issue found, and in which version it this issue fixed? Because the release notes of 4.6.0 and 4.6.0.01 does not mention anything about Edge browsers or Intel video cards. We are seeing the same on a Wowza 4.4.1. We are planning an upgrade to 4.6, but if this issue is not fixed in that version, we would like to know in which version this issue will be fixed.

Also where is the ‘HLS/HDS delivery type’ option? We have all delivery types on (HLS/HDS/Smooth/DASH) enabled in the live application in Wowza. And still this issue is there with HLS.

Hello,

This forum post is regarding the Wowza Streaming Cloud product and the instructions given were specifically for this product in order to correct the issue. If you are seeing this issue with your Wowza Streaming Engine, I would suggest logging a support request via the account portal. Please be sure to provide your conf and log folder to expedite the review process.

Regards,

Mac

Hello Mac,

I had already posted a support ticket shortly before posting this thread and I believe you’ve responded to that so I guess we’ll take it from here.

Should anyone suffer this issue in the future: We have found at least a temporary solution by forcing our JWplayer to use the Flash stream if available. Since Microsoft Edge comes with a Flash Player built-in, this should work for most of our clients who had this issue.

Still, given the fact that HLS streaming should be natively supported in Edge (and it is, since desktops and laptops with dedicated graphics cards work fine), I’m definitely interested in getting to the source of the problem. Especially because Flash has been banned for some of our clients in the past due to security issues.

Hi,

Any follow up on this bug ? We had similar issues recently. Switching to HLS/HDS delivery type did work but we would like to know if you were able to fix the proper bug ?

Thanks

I have heard from out customers that Windows 10 Creators edition will fix this issue. He has tested it on a Sufrace4 tablet with the latest Windows 10 version. The artifacts are gone.